Author: mino

http://www.interfluidity.com/v2/6632.html

Election angst
Domestic politics in the United States are worse at this moment than they have ever been in my sad 46 years of life. And if your response is “they did it”, whoever they are, you are, I think missing the point, missing the problem. We are in this together. Once we’ve made a civil war of it we have already lost, however just the side you choose to fight on. Often moral errors feel like moral imperatives at the time.
[…]
Nations are either integrating or they are fragmenting. The United States spent much of the 20th Century integrating. It is currently fragmenting. We currently discuss and perceive this in very racialized terms (a fact which in my view is itself a symptom of the fragmentation). Through about the 1990s, more and more groups of people integrated into a community it is now offensive to describe as “American”. We now refer to this community as “white”, in order to emphasize by contrast the unfairness and horror of the United States’ greatest shame, our failure to fully integrate descendants of the immigrants we involuntarily imported and then brutally enslaved. Since around 2000, in my view, the “white” United States has been fragmenting. Integration has been replaced by ethnogenesis. The communities from which Trump enthusiasts disproportionately arise may be increasingly white supremicist, but they are no longer unproblematically “white” in its meaning as “default American”. They compete for national identity with ascendant “people of color”, sure, but before you go on about racial last-place aversion, note that they compete more directly and much more bitterly with a cosmopolitan but disproportionately “white” urban professional class, whose whiteness has itself been problematized, as underlined by a resurgent anti-Semitism where Jews stand-in for this class broadly.
[…]
…A fault line was always going to appear between the economically dominant class and much of the rest of the country which has been left behind…All humans are racists in some ways and to some degrees, but it was not at all inevitable, I think, that we end up in a “battle between cosmopolitan finance capitalism and ethno-nationalist backlash”, as Chris Hayes put it…It is tempting, among those of us who would be appalled by a Trump victory, to try to sway undecided voters by equating voting for Trump with racism full-stop. That’s a bad idea. If it becomes the mainstream view that Trump voters are simply racists, it leaves those who are already committed, those who are unwilling to abandon Trump or to stomach Clinton, little choice but to own what they’ve been accused of. Racist is the new queer. The same daring, transgressional psychology that, for gay people, converted an insult into a durable token of identity may persuade a mass of people who otherwise would not have challenged the social taboo surrounding racism to accept the epithet with defiant equanimity or even to embrace it. The assertion that Trump’s supporters are all racists has, I think, become partially self-fulfilling. In and of itself, that will make America’s already deeply ugly racial politics uglier. It will help justify the further pathologization of the emerging white underclass while doing nothing at all to help communities of color except, conveniently for some, to set the groups at one another’s throats so they cannot make common cause. It will become yet another excuse for beneficiaries of economic stratification to blame its victims. Things were bad before this election. They are worse now, and we should be very careful about how we carry this experience forward. These are frightening times.

Edit: I want to include Booman’s link as a less polite send up of urbans and their “acceptable” prejudices…

*How Half Of America Lost Its F**king Mind*

http://www.cracked.com/blog/6-reasons-trumps-rise-that-no-one-talks-about/

Robert Reich published a piece of look-back on his blog this week that encapsulates WHY Clinton solutions are not trusted.  It lays out how taxation of executive compensation was finessed to quiet the critics without angering the elites.

“The measure became section 162(m) of the IRS tax code. It was supposed to cap executive pay. But it just shifted executive pay from salaries to stock options.

After that, not surprisingly, stock options soared – becoming by far the largest portion of CEO pay.”

Was Clinton a party to the play or conned by his advisors, many of whom are still members in good standing with DNC?  Still have the ear of policy makers.

This was further discussed on Naked Capitalism….

“Naked Capitalism readers are familiar with the fact that CEO compensation exploded starting in the 90s, and that this explosion was related to a shift towards companies providing compensation in the form of stock options.  A major cause of the shift was Bill Clinton’s 1993 move to make executive comp deductible from corporate income taxes only when given as stock options.
[…]
    When Bill Clinton first proposed his plan, compensation for CEOs at America’s 350 largest corporations averaged $4.9 million.  By the end of the Clinton administration, it had ballooned to $20.3 million.  Since then, it’s gone into the stratosphere.

Did Reich realize what a striking story he was telling?  In the name of eschewing “social engineering through the tax code,” Clinton and his advisors engineered a major shift in corporate culture.  In the name of not “declaring class warfare,” they struck a dramatic blow in favor of… a certain social class.  If they had been Republicans, this story would have entered the canon as evidence for what that party really cares about.  They were liberals, though, and so it is instead a mournful tale of irony and unintended consequences.”
http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2016/09/the-bill-clinton-teams-secret-meeting-on-ceo-compensation.htm
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From the comments:
“Reich doesn’t name his fellow economic advisors who came up with this, but it’s not heard to guess from the press coverage at the time.

    … Lawrence H. Summers, a Harvard economics professor on leave to be chief economist at the World Bank, will oversee work on economic policy, including tax policy and whether fiscal stimulus is needed. Mr. Summers is often mentioned as a possible future chairman of the President’s Council of Economic Advisers. …

    … several other experts would work with Mr. Summers on economic policy. They include Robert Shapiro, an economist at the Progressive Policy Institute; Robert Rubin, co-chairman of Goldman Sachs, and Roger Altman, a friend of Mr. Clinton’s from their Georgetown University days and now a partner in the Blackstone Group, a New York investment bank.”

(Larry Summers long ago earned the distrust of leftists and that is why I suspect Kabuki. Were the Clintons pwned or party to it?  Does it matter?  Have they gotten wise is today’s question.  Guess we get to find out.)

Curious.  This article is three yrs old. http://inthesetimes.com/article/15621/city_of_the_future_who_holds_the_keys

I wonder if anyone has input on what has been happening?

 5 Cities in the Midst of a Neoliberal Takeover

    Chicago: The city that brought you neoliberal education reform is pioneering new depths of privatization. after handing over its freeway and parking meters to investors, Chicago is about to become the first metro area to sell off a major airport. Still on the horizon is a new “infrastructure trust” that will open the floodgates of profiteering–er, leverage private investment–on public works projects.
    San Francisco: The city by the bay has courted new “sharing economy” businesses like Sidecar and Airbnb. But the economic benefits aren’t, in fact, shared very widely: the city faces a $170 million deficit, and evictions are at a 12-year high as gentrification continues to send rents soaring.
    Philadelphia: When Mayor Michael Nutter appeared on a Brookings Institution panel to discuss “Philadelphia as a model for the nation,” residents were perplexed. Philadelphia does bear the distinction of closing 23 schools while building a $400 million state prison. It is also busy selling off the Philadelphia Gas Works, the nation’s largest municipally owned gas utility, with help from JPMorgan.
    Atlanta: A crop of “contract cities”–which outsource nearly all public services to private corporations–has popped up in the metro Atlanta region since 2005. Critics say that they are naked attempts to create lily-white enclaves walled off from Atlanta, which has the fifth-highest foreclosure rate in the nation.
    Baltimore: The city that gave us The Wire is about to get even more hyper-segregated, thanks to an enormous redevelopment project by Johns Hopkins university and its non-profit partner East Baltimore Development, Inc. The $1.8 billion raze-and-rebuild has already displaced more than 700 families.  

vs
 5 Cities on the Verge of a Progressive Upswing

    Jackson, Miss.: In June, voters elected a new mayor: black nationalist organizer and attorney Chokwe Lumumba. Lumumba’s platform of “self-determination and economic democracy” won the hearts of Jackson’s residents, 80 percent of whom are African-American, and engaged them through a “people’s assembly” process that the new mayor plans to repeat every three months.
    San Jose: Inequality soared in San Jose, as in many tech-industry-dominated cities, during the past decade. But students at San Jose State University, many of them low-wage workers, spearheaded a campaign to help close the gap. Their ballot initiative mandating a minimum-wage increase–from $8 to $10 an hour–passed in November.
    Cleveland: Worker-owned cooperatives are helping revitalize this rust-belt city. Launched in 2008, the Evergreen Cooperatives, which include a green laundry and an urban-farming initiative, are bringing living-wage jobs to six low-income neighborhoods. The businesses received start-up capital from the city and draw on the purchasing power of local hospitals and universities.
    St. Louis: Even though privatization of city water systems is often an unmitigated disaster, it’s proceeding apace in many cities. But in St. Louis, a campaign by progressive activists forced Mayor Francis Slay to put the city’s contract with Veolia, the largest private water service provider in the world, on hold this February.
    Chicago: The city known as ground zero for free-market reform is also home to a vigorous democratic rebellion. Following the unpopular closures of 50 school public schools this summer, the Chicago Teachers Union and its allies are building a movement to unseat Mayor Rahm Emanuel and his loyalists in the 2015 elections.

Well, Rahm got re-elected in Chicago.  And Baltimore had its $15 minimum wage defeated by city council Democrats just recently.

Cleveland won the NBA Championship this year.

Any other good news?

So middleclass and underclass whites may have decided to stop being the veal pen for Republican elites?  Can they attract enough serious planners to actually gain power for some populist planks that are not idiotic? Might youth find an opening for progressive alliances?

Is Trump Wrecking Both Parties?
“The larger conclusion from the data is that the Trump campaign — both through the support Trump generates among working-class whites and the opposition he generates among better educated, more affluent voters — has accelerated the ongoing transformation of the Democratic Party. Once a class-based coalition, the party has become an alliance between upscale well-educated whites and, importantly, ethnic and racial minorities, many of them low income.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/08/11/opinion/campaign-stops/is-trump-wrecking-both-parties.html?_r=0

Also, an even more trenchant article…
Trading Places: If the Democrats Are Now a Coastal Elite Party and the GOP Are the Populists, Trump Is Only the Beginning
(Yeah, Hillary will probably win. But unless Democrats can be more than the Whole Foods party, they’re doomed.)http://www.alternet.org/election-2016/trading-places-if-democrats-are-now-coastal-elite-party-and-go
p-are-populists-trump

So far, Republican Reformicons have not embraced anti-corporatism, but the vein is definitely open for exploitation.

Hmm, some already exploring:
http://thefederalist.com/2014/07/16/can-anti-corporatist-populism-save-the-gops-electoral-fortunes/

The DNC Platform: “The new platform articulates support for parents who opt their children out of standardized tests, and opposes the use of test scores to evaluate teachers and administrators. The platform also is more conditional in its support for charter schools–stating that they must “accept and retain proportionate numbers of students of color, students with disabilities, and English language learners,” and that charters must not “replace or destabilize traditional public schools.””

I have wondered what are the “asks” of HC’s loyal base of POC supporters and not gotten much feedback. So I was surprised to come across this clear ASK, that gets almost NO MSM coverage…Stopping the privatization of public schools.

A comprehensive article on the anti-charter efforts of NAACP since 2010.  I would hope there is better support than the DNC platform admits.
https:/cloakinginequity.com/2016/07/28/naacp-has-weighed-in-do-charterscivil-rights

McBride wanted President Obama to make Ceasefire and similar programs part of his post-Newtown push to reduce gun violence. (https:/www.ncjrs.gov/pdffiles1/nij/228386.pdf)

A recent ProPublica story highlighted the accomplishments of Operation Ceasefire as confirmed by rigorous studies, as well as the difficulties community leaders have had in maintaining federal support for the programs.
(https:/www.propublica.org/article/how-the-gun-control-debate-ignores-black-lives (Read this one, if no others.  You will understand the cynicism.)

“Mass shootings, unsurprisingly, drive the national debate on gun violence. But as horrific as these massacres are, by most counts they represent less than 1 percent of all gun homicides. America’s high rate of gun murders isn’t caused by events like Sandy Hook or the shootings this fall at a community college in Oregon. It’s fueled by a relentless drumbeat of deaths of black men.”

Guess who DID fund Ceasefire?  The farking NRA.  Also, see Project Exile.

But we now advantage the “most worthy” in our system.  The ones making national headlines.  Why is this not part of the ASK for Democratic POC?

Curious what you make of these suggestions from economist Dan Kervick?

Dan Kervick said…
Left Progressive Agenda:

1. Single payer health care.
2. The Rebuild America Act or its equivalent: a $1 trillion+ infrastructure and national redevelopment program.
3. Implementation of Keynes’s “somewhat comprehensive socialization of investment.”

    4.Combination of higher marginal income tax rates, capital gains taxes & related salary and compensation caps to create 10/1 maximum income differential ratio.

5. Elimination of defined contribution plans, with expansion of social security into a universal and fully adequate national pension program.
6. Socialization of post-secondary education.
7. Creation of a sovereign wealth fund.
8. Use of wealth & inheritance taxes to carry out broad based wealth redistribution and capital reform.
9. Restoration of the government gross investment share of GDP to 1950s/60’s levels.
10. Communities first: Use of industrial policy and a public sector jobs program to channel new capital & jobs to communities suffering capitalist dislocations due to trade and innovation.
11. A public option in banking including post office banks.
12. Movement toward a global capital registry, organized under international law.
13. Use of the global capital registry to restrict and eliminate capital flight, tax havens, income shelters, etc.
14. Supply side “stick” policies: tax penalties for excessive extraction of firm wealth as shareholder income, thus incentivizing re-investment and returns to labor.
15. Expansion of ongoing adult education opportunities, including mandated periodic employer-granted sabbaticals across the adult lifespan.
16. An education policy geared toward the amelioration and elimination of class divisions.
17. Share our work: distribution of whatever amount of work we need to do as a nation as evenly as is practicable across the population.
18. Reduce commercial pollution: endeavor to expand the reach and scope of cultural and social interaction spaces that are free of commercial communication.
19. Reduce the size of the financial sector and target a much lower private debt-to-GDP ratio.
20. Simplify our lives: reduce the time and needless redundancy and complexity of personal and household financial management.

As opposed to this eventuality…http://www.keeptalkinggreece.com/2016/06/14/imf-germany-to-legalize-slavery-in-greece-with-single-mi
nimum-wage-system/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+KeepTalkingGr
eece+%28Keep+Talking+Greece%29

Dani Rodrik is Professor of International Political Economy at Harvard University’s John F. Kennedy School of Government. He is the author of The Globalization Paradox: Democracy and the Future of the World Economy and, most recently, Economics Rules: The Rights and Wrongs of the Dismal Science.

The Politics of Anger

Perhaps the only surprising thing about the populist backlash that has overwhelmed the politics of many advanced democracies is that it has taken so long. Even two decades ago, it was easy to predict that mainstream politicians’ unwillingness to offer remedies for the insecurities and inequalities of our hyper-globalized age would create political space for demagogues with easy solutions. Back then, it was Ross Perot and Patrick Buchanan; today it is Donald Trump, Marine Le Pen, and sundry others.
[…]
In reality, today’s world economy is the product of explicit decisions that governments have made in the past. It was a choice not to stop at the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) and to build the much more ambitious – and intrusive – WTO. Similarly, it will be a choice whether to ratify future mega-trade deals such as the Trans-Pacific Partnership and the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership.
[…]
If one lesson of history is the danger of globalization running amok, another is the malleability of capitalism. It was the New Deal, the welfare state, and controlled globalization (under the Bretton Woods regime) that eventually gave market-oriented societies a new lease on life and produced the post-war boom. It was not tinkering and minor modification of existing policies that produced these achievements, but radical institutional engineering.
Moderate politicians, take note.

Why Liberal Economists Dish Out Despair
By Gerald Friedman

APR 20, 2016 |    MACROECONOMIC THEORY |    HISTORY OF ECONOMIC THOUGHT | INSTITUTIONS, POLICY & POLITICS |    REINTRODUCING ECONOMIC THEORY

How Gerald Friedman’s assessment of Bernie Sanders economic proposals prompted a rare public political spat among economists:

The angry reaction to my report revealed that by some combination of rationalization and the dominance of neoclassical microeconomics since the 1970s, liberal economists have virtually abandoned Keynesian economics, which supported the notion that governments can and must intervene in the economy to ensure the best results for society. These economists went back to pre-Keynesian thinking, where price fluctuations are supposed to equilibrate supply and demand at full employment with an optimal distribution of good and services. The very suggestion that government action can result in increases in growth rates or wages is now taken to be obviously wrong. Adopting the language of neoclassical micro welfare economics, everything is already as good as can be — all that government can do is to make it worse. Criticisms of the orthodox model and its policies are deemed worthy of scorn, to be dismissed tout court because they are obviously at variance not only with textbook economics, but with what we need to believe to rationalize failure.
[…]
But what if they are wrong? What if government action could, in fact, raise growth rates or narrow disparities? What would be the expected value of a higher GDP growth rate? Would it be worth some academic debate, even if it leaked into the public realm? Might this debate even serve a socially useful function by giving voters an alternative to the xenophobic political economy of Donald Trump? Many Americans believe that government action can improve economic conditions, especially for workers, and many of these support Trump because they see him as the only candidate who is even willing to consider government action to help working Americans. These voters can look long and hard at the “responsible” Clinton platform for some policy, for any policy to raise growth rates and narrow income disparities. But they won’t find it, because policy elites have closed their minds to the possibility of change.
[…]
Controversy reflects the disagreements and uncertainty that alone can lead to intellectual progress. It is time to inject some of these into orthodox macroeconomics. We have been ill-served by a smugly sure macroeconomics both in imagination and policy. Amazingly, the crisis of 2007-9 has left intact the dominant pseudo-Keynesian orthodoxy; maybe the kerfuffle around my report will help to open some space for constructive dialog in a profession that has clearly grown too complacent.

(Read the article.  There has been cross-pollenation between the schools after the fire burned out.)

Democratic elites get upset when THEIR voters actually vote their issues when those issues are largely economic: “After decades of being told white workers would never support socialism because they’re racist, we’re now told that they support the socialist candidate because they are racist. Yes, this is where liberals are in the year 2016.”

… The party has established a clear line on the white wage-earning class: they’re all either dying (demographically or literally), irrelevant in an increasingly nonwhite country, or so hopelessly racist they can go off themselves with a Miller High Life-prescription-painkiller cocktail for all they care. As liberal hero and Sanders nemesis Barney Frank put it a couple of weeks ago, “the likelihood that fifty-eight-year-old coal miners are going to become the solar engineers of the future is nil.”

The problem with this line is not just that it’s gross and elitist — it’s that it’s not even true. The working class is bigger than ever, is still really white, and is broadly supportive of a progressive populist agenda.

It just turns out that the Democratic Party outside of Sanders isn’t too interested in that agenda. And it’s even less interested in that specific chunk of the working class that forces liberals to confront head on the naked brutality of the economic system they cherish…
https:/www.jacobinmag.com/2016/05/white-workers-bernie-sanders-clinton-primary-racism